Sunday night in New Orleans, after the Philadelphia Eagles had overpowered the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl, a middle-aged man in business attire danced with Eagles players in the locker room.
Howie Roseman’s dance moves were revealed as ordinary, but in the preceding hours, his team-building skills were re-confirmed as extraordinary.
The Eagles, displaying the NFL’s best roster, bullied the Chiefs on both lines and seized their second Super Bowl victory in eight years under Roseman, their general manager.
Pre-Roseman, Philadelphia hadn’t won an NFL title since its 1960 team edged out Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers.
Roseman is 49. He may not have peaked.
Even scarier for Eagles opponents is this: until NFL teams see that Roseman’s nontraditional background gives him edges that he’ll relentlessly leverage, he’ll be playing poker with better cards.
Roseman comes from a business background, in contrast to the many former NFL scouts-turned-general managers.
Backgrounds of various types can correlate to GM success. The Chiefs have reached five Super Bowls under GM Brett Veach, who for many years worked as an NFL scout (with the bright Eagles).
Roseman, grounded in salary cap machinations, negotiations and analytics, is a wheeler-dealer deluxe.
And he’s run circles around many GMs who are not.
Hired by the Eagles as an intern soon after graduating from Fordham’s law school, Roseman appreciated his Eagles scouts, earned their trust and grew as an evaluator, said former Eagles executive Joe Banner, who hired and molded Roseman.
Crucially, Roseman learned how to accurately judge players.
Contrasting the scaredy-cat teams, Roseman sees the whole NFL marketplace as a potential roster-building resource. Throughout the calendar year, he tries to understand what each one of the other 31 teams is thinking and seize upon respective inflection points to mine gold. (In that respect, an MLB kindred spirit is the Padres’ A.J. Preller, a longtime fan of the New York Giants, a divisional rival of the Eagles.)
Powered by good information and what Banner described as a defining fearlessness, he has moved both up and down NFL drafts at high rate, often to good effect, and has swung a wide variety of trades that succeeded.
Unlike the rival Dallas Cowboys, Roseman often locks up his better players before they become overly expensive. Bargains result.
Like the Chiefs, Roseman will take a chance on a super-talented player whose off-field actions scared off other teams, such as star defensive tackle Jalen Carter, 23.
As part of the franchise’s decade-plus embrace of cutting-edge sports science, he has overseen Eagles teams that tended to have excellent health relative to NFL norms.
Banner came from a non-traditional background, too. He exposed Roseman to the thinking behind his grand slam hire in 1999 of Andy Reid, who hadn’t been a head coach or an NFL coordinator; and no doubt lobbied on behalf of analytics, which Banner had embraced ahead of the NFL curve.
Add it all up, and Roseman has been playing a more informed and aggressive game than many of the other team-builders in the NFL.
That’s a point Andrew Brandt has been making for several years.
Brandt, who understands behind-the-scenes team-building as a former NFL player agent and Green Bay Packers executive, hammered on the “background” theme Sunday night while the Eagles were overwhelming the Chiefs.
“Even with the unqualified success of Howie Roseman, with a salary cap/contract/business background, NFL decision-makers are still hiring GMs primarily with scouting backgrounds,” Brandt said in a social media post, touched up here for clarity. “It’s different in MLB and the NBA.
“Many NFL owners,” Brandt added, “are still acting like Neanderthals.”
Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie wasn’t always enamored of Roseman.
Banner said that Lurie, a longtime friend, effectively fired Roseman in 2015 after Roseman lost a power struggle with coach Chip Kelly. Though Roseman remained employed, he’d lost his personnel duties.
Roseman, seeking a new job, sounded out several NFL teams during that time.
Fortunately for the Eagles, no other NFL team wanted him, and a year later, when Kelly flamed out, Roseman returned to power.
True to the Eagles fight song, Roseman 2.0 was ready to “Fly, Howie, Fly.”
Importantly, Roseman continued to apply an organizational bedrock belief: do one’s utmost to build powerful lines.
Over the ensuing eight seasons, beginning in 2017, the Eagles would win an NFC-best 63% of their games and three NFC titles.
Their two Super Bowl-winning seasons have come with different first-time head coaches hired by Roseman (Doug Pederson and Nick Sirianni) and two different quarterbacks cheaply obtained by Roseman (journeyman Nick Foles and the homegrown Jalen Hurts).
Not worried about saving face, Roseman showed he can make the best of his big errors, such as when he ate a lot of dead money on the bloated contract he gave quarterback Carson Wentz. Then he gave Hurts the roster needed to succeed.
A GM’s job gets tougher after the Super Bowl confetti is swept up.
Still, my hunch is Sunday’s public dancing display wasn’t Howie’s last.
